A perfect way to spend New Year EX! On a 7 hour trek!

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Well I can safely say I missed the 11.30pm government curfew by 8 hours but the rules don't count on New Years Eve!

I had to be up at 8am to start my 7 hour village tour. It was amazing both physical and mentally stimulating!It started with meeting my tour guide Song. It turned out that I was the only one on this tour so I had my own personal guide. EXTRA

We began with a dusty Son Tau ride up to a remote village and then we got a speedboat to a part of the jungle. We had to wait for the speedboat to be fixed, speedboats are very basic here even compared to Thailand standards.

We walked for a long time before we came to the first village and in all that time Song told me stories about the village. Some of the concepts were difficult to understand but I will try explain them the best I can. The village we were going to were inhabited by Kamu people. Kamu people are not Buddhists but are spirit people. They believe the body is made up of 32 spirits (32 animals) - perhaps you have 3 chickens, 2 dogs, 5 cats, 1 buffalo etc... inside you. If you lose a spirit, eg a chicken and have only 31 spirits you can get ill. To remedy the situation you must go to the shaman who will tell you 'kill a chicken' and sacrifice it to the spirit house then you will be healed. The village shaman knows everything. A spirit person believes that if you go in the jungle you can lose a spirit and you have to be careful. Sometimes a spirit can touch another spirit (the chicken might anger the buffalo) within your body and this can make you ill.

He explained that in Laos the people in LP speak Laos and the people in Vientiane speak Lao with Thai pronunciation. There are three types of people in Laos - mong, lao and kamu. Kamus came from Cambodia, Laos come from China and Mon came from Mongolia. Song was a Mong person. Mong's believe in re-incarnation. For example it is well-known that when a man dies the mark from the sling he used to carry his son re-appears on the son's son's body as the grandfather has come back as his son.

At New Years Eve the Lao people go into the village. They take their Lao whisky and all their food and prepare it their in the jungle and wait to see in the New Year. The village chief fires three shots into the air with his gun to mark midnight. A sling shot is made of the national flower Champa, and is platted using two plats. Everybody before midnight must walk over the slingshot in an anti-clockwise direction. After midnight they must turn and each walk over it in a clockwise direction to symbolize the new year. They throw the slingshot away, three chickens are killed and the shaman takes their eggs back to the house to symbolize the start to the new year.

Song took me to the first village. To get to it he gave me two options a. to cross a bamboo bridge that clearly wouldn't take my weight or take off my shoes, roll up my jeans and cross the river. I crossed the river and dried my feet with a hat. In the meantime I saw people washing their vegetables in the river to cook during New Years Day. Once in the first village we Song had brought food. We had dried fish, dried meat, boiled rice, sticky rice, an apple and a Satsuma. We ate them together sharing the food in the middle of the table and eating sticky rice with our hands. Good job I brought my alcohol gel.

In the village people were making their roovs for their houses and houses out of bamboo. I saw children playing, Song showed me the village meeting place and I nosied around the primary school where there were lots of signs on the walls showing children how to wash their hands.

We continued up through the jungle, crossing rivers and jumping over bamboo bridges. Song moved with the ease of Bambi, but I took a bit longer. He showed me Campa the national flower, how to make a slingshot from it, he showed me tobacco growing plantations and I tasted various samples of different food and flowers under his instruction. I saw enormous spider webs, learned that snakes rise to the high ground when there is no sun as they always look for sun, and I saw a few pigs and walked amongst cows. In the second village the ladies were weaving silk that they bring from the town. I bought two wristbands, one for me and one for Song to remind me of who I spent New Years with. We saw a third village and then jumped on a speedboat to the Tad Sae waterfall. There we saw people riding elephants and doin zip lining It took about 30 minutes to ge there. It was so relaxing on the way back with the mountains in the background that I almost fell asleep. The tour was so good I tipped 20 dollars when the tour itself had cost me 55 dollars but EXTRA

At 7pm I met Daniel for dinner as we had arranged. He took me to a really nice place called Savadee where we sat on the floor with cushions and the whole restaurant was lit up with fairy lights from new year. We ordered buffalo and ginger. Afterwards we looked for a bar that was open and we braved the old communist era bridge which is not unsafe but extremely high. I returned to my dorm with a big grin on my face. The next day I checked out of my dorm and moved closer to Daniel's hostel. EXTRA

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